The confirmation today by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, that the government intends to go ahead with plans to grant itself unchecked and unscrutinised access to all our communications data must draw a battle line for all civil liberties groups and everyone who cares for the future of freedom and privacy in the United Kingdom.

On the surface, the statement from the Home Office may appear to offer some withdrawal from the data silo –containing all communications data– proposedin the Queen's speech. However in effect the state will still grant itself total freedom to see whom we are contacting, when and where. The only difference is that civil servants will demand that private telecoms companies and internet service providers do their dirty work for them. They will retain our data so that it may be trawled by tens of thousands of people employed by the state.

Who knows what conclusions will be drawn from innocent web searches, phonecalls and emails? Who dares to predict the kinds of abuse by the government, which is already tracking legitimate protesters in real time with automatic number recognition camera network cameras and infiltrating environmental groups with informers and spies?

This outsourcing of the state's data collection is the government's response to the era of austerity – in a similar move it will require travel agencies and tour companies to collect 53 pieces of information for the e-Borders scheme when we travel abroad. We should not be lulled into seeing this as change in the government's goal of knowing everything about every one of us. The civil servants behind the scheme have a very long horizon indeed – an agenda that is designed to survive cuts in public spending and any change of government.

They will argue the urgent necessity of the case with force and plausibility to inexperienced Conservative ministers, as they have done to the co-operative second raters in the present government. I pray that a future government will have the gumption, sense of history and political values to resist these arguments and to listen instead to the former director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald, who said: "This database would be an unimaginable hell house of personal private information. It would be a complete read-out of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail." The data silo may have been canned but the violation continues.

If we had not been so ground down by Labour's war on liberty and privacy there would certainly be an outcry at this disgraceful proposal. Ministers say that we are merely complying with European demands for greater access to communications but what they do not explain is that they lobbied Europe for these very measures.

Their effect is well described by campaign group NO2ID's general secretary, Guy Herbert, who said: "Officials from dozens of departments and quangos could know what you read online, and who all your friends are, who you emailed, when, and where you were when you did so – all without a warrant. Tracking your every move is more efficiently creepy than reading your letters." Think of the abuses that have been allowed under the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and you know we may come to regret it if we do not stand up to the government now.

Meanwhile I leave you with this thought which began a piece in the Daily Telegraph.

Your moves are monitored by your bus tickets. There are CCTV cameras on every building and computer chips on the rubbish bin and they can tell a lot about your life by studying your rubbish...Security has got absurd

As the paper reveals, the Russian journalist Irada Zeinalova wasn't talking about Putin's Russia. She wasn't even talking about life in the former Soviet Union. She was talking about today in Britain where she has been based for several years.